Bill Burns’ Safety Gear for Small Animals fill my head with thoughts. Photo: Bill Burns.
Grasping what huge processes like climate change actually means to society and us as persons can be difficult. Reading about it can sometimes be a bit technical or abstract, and even talking about it it’s sometimes difficult to find the words.
I suppose this is natural, since we are facing something entirely new. Never before has humanity had to deal with globally hitting environmental problems in this way.
Going towards anti-utopia?
As in most cases when trying to deal with new and big issues, art can be of help – or confuse us even more. But at least I think it starts a lot of new thoughts.
The other day I went to an art centre in one of Stockholm’s suburbs, Tensta Centre of Contemporary art. Their current exhibition Rethink Kakotopia has taken its name after the term Kakotopia that the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham used to describe an anti-utopic society in chaos and disintegration. This exhibition plays with the idea that climate change could bring us into that state, and poses the question: Will our psyche and socio-economic systems be capable of grasping and responding to this challenge?
Humorous perspectives
Several of the works tries to see the problem from a different angle, recognizing that we humans are not the only ones affected. Humour is an important part of it, as the artist group Superflex’s project where they offer people a hypnosis session to experience climate change as an eagle, a polar bear or a cockroach. Or Bill Burns’ Safety Gear for Small Animals. At least my head was filled with thoughts about how we choose what is worth protecting when I saw his tiny frog or mouse sized life vests, bullet-proof vests and helmets.
Virtual gallery
On the art centre’s web page you can also see their first Virtual Gallery exhibition, featuring the photographic series Nomadographies, which explores themes of how humans relate to each other and to the environment.
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